Now that I have some free-time I am itching to work on interesting things on the side, but alas I have no good ideas.
Where can I get some?
Is there a good place to get paired with people who have ideas or need help?
To find out what people need/want there are different ways to find out: Sites like: http://www.43things.com/zeitgeist/goals might help.
Also take a look at PGs "Ideas for Startups": http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Great links - thanks. I had read the PG article a while ago but a re-read is good idea.
Ditto noodleshare and builditwith.me
You can also try techcofounder.com. I hear the response rate for developers is quite high.
Your throwaway account is hindering my ability to Google you (and subsequently contact you myself), so if you want to talk, feel free to contact me. I have ideas too :).
And then there are gems like this: "What is "Unified Passport System"? It likes Oauth, but it's more complicated." Yeah, because people were complaining that OAuth was too simple ;)
I guess you may find something worthwhile in there, but it seems to me that you can get a better return of your time by looking at what's already out there and thinking on how to improve it.
Thanks for the comments - I will check those out.
The concept is pretty simple, use the existing payments structure which is built around credit cards and create a card that 'cannot' be used for fraud. The latter bit requires some clarification.
So in my use case, I've got vendors who I would like to establish a long term relationship, whether it's a subscription to the WSJ, or a my App Store credit card on file. I give them a credit card number and they keep it on file, I periodically buy services/products from them, and everything is great until my credit card gets compromised some how and then I have to go unwind all of these arrangements with a new card number. Even when I use a 'special' card just for subscription services (easier for me to monitor) if someone breaks into one of my vendors databases "just for the lulz" and my details get out then I still have to go change all my numbers. Its a fact of life but it is also a pain point for me.
What I would like is to have a payments system where I could give the vendor a "credit card" and they could authorize it for transactions. That would send me a text which says "they want to authorize" and if I respond appropriately the relationship is set up. Now if that number gets compromised, the person who gets it can't use it for hotel reservations or 100 pizzas because it isn't authorized to make purchases anywhere except for the vendors where I pre-established a relationship.
Basically getting my card compromised at the LOLCatz shopping cart portal doesn't give the attacker any power other than to spend more than I would expect to spend at the LOLCatz store. My life gets better, the credit card company has less fraud exposure, and I no longer have 'change the card everywhere' firedrills.
As a bonus if this credit card front end could be attached to other payment sources "behind the wall" as it were (imagine having a credit card number that had properties like a Google Voice phone number, it could draw from multiple sources to pay out.) Then I could do even better by attaching 'dubious' cards to an account with a limited withdrawal rate.
I would love to be in charge of my credit like that and I have a much better view over what is, and is not, an attempt at fraud (presuming of course that I am not the fraudster).
I wish some bright YC group somewhere would build something like this.
You can set myriad fine-grained controls like "only permit Office Depot purchases of paper reams, Monday thru Friday, in zip code 94304, $40 maximum per use." Stuff like that.
The account administrator gets a granular data feed with all the purchases pre-categorized, and reconciliation and reporting software.
The trouble competitors have is gathering the data at the point of sale. American Express blows away the competition on data, primarily because of card readers. Many American Express merchants have a separate card reader which can be programmed to force the merchant to filter transactions based on the controls set on the cardholder's account. Many companies won't buy from suppliers who aren't fully set up for American Express purchasing cards, which is why so many suppliers go through the trouble of uploading their product database and paying the high transaction fees.
Its not the concept that is disruptive, its opening up the market to a much larger base of consumers.
This "The trouble competitors have is gathering the data at the point of sale. American Express blows away the competition on data, primarily because of card readers. Many American Express merchants have a separate card reader which can be programmed to force the merchant to filter transactions based on the controls set on the cardholder's account. Many companies won't buy from suppliers who aren't fully set up for American Express purchasing cards, which is why so many suppliers go through the trouble of uploading their product database and paying the high transaction fees." is so true in meat space and doesn't need to be true on the Internet. 'Readers' are as sophisticated as the shopping cart software needs them to be.
The value adds here are:
1) This gives individuals control over their exposure by sharing credit cards with these vendors.
2) This mitigates fraud / change on those accounts which for consumer cards is a huge part of the expense.
3) This creates an exemplar of a payments system which is more buyer focussed and thus differentiates from existing payment services.
How familiar are you with the regulations guarding the banking industry?
How do you plan to solve the chicken-egg adoption problem? Most vendors offer 3 to 5 credit card brands, and they won't want to adulterate their payment forms with strange unproven options. I wonder if collaborating with companies that build shopping cart plugins is the way to go or if you would have to fly solo for awhile before the established shopping cart players would take you seriously.
How many people are clamoring for such a financial account? If my credit card account gets comprised, the most I'm liable for is $50 or something like that. I check my transaction log for unusual activity, which I do with any financial account. Even companies that have purchasing cards reconcile the transactions. Apart from not having to pay $50 if my card ever gets compromised, what benefit would your bank serve to me?
"How familiar are you with the regulations guarding the banking industry?" - out of date. Back when I was trying to get Sun into e-commerce (1995) was plugged in with Visa, First Data, SWIFT, these days not so much. At the time the regulations came in two forms, "Fair Credit" which is to say regulations regarding consumer relationships with the bank, and "Liability management" which was more interested in defining exactly when the liability for a transaction changed from one party to another.
"How do you plan to solve the chicken-egg adoption problem?" - I suspect the best way would be to partner with a vendor whose brand is under served (Discover comes to mind) The alternative is a slog ala Paypal's early days and no, we don't have an Ebay to leverage. Apple perhaps, especially if it meant Apple got to collect some buying habits metrics, they also have a big iTunes installed base this could plug into.
"How many people are clamoring for such a financial account? If my credit card account gets comprised, the most I'm liable for is $50 or something like that. I check my transaction log for unusual activity, which I do with any financial account. Even companies that have purchasing cards reconcile the transactions. Apart from not having to pay $50 if my card ever gets compromised, what benefit would your bank serve to me?" - One can never know for sure until you ship, but here are some bits of reasoning I've been using successfully:
People are being trained to leave a credit card on file for on-going purchases. Started really with iTunes but now every game console has something like it, every e-reader has something like it. Some online merchants like Amazon and O'Reilly support it. Concommitant with that many monthly services have enabled an 'auto-pay' facility of one form or another, currently dominated by banks but we could build one that was bank independent with the right API.
These changes are 'new' in that you haven't really had them on your credit card before, so the 'pain' comes when you have to unwind-rewind them. You go to buy something on Steam for example and it complains your card is invalid, and you go "oh yeah I had to cancel that card and they must have the old card." A lot of people who had Playstation network accounts got to experience this when that system got compromised.
My claim is that the convienience of 'dynamic subscriptions' will get wider (there are AppStores everywhere now!) the early servers of these are CC companies and phone companies, both of whom have "issues" with customer satisfaction and flexibility. I also claim that the pain of 'losing' control of a card will get worse as you have more and more of these dynamic subscriptions linked to it.
I expect the initial response will be multiple cards, but this adds its own issue if the statements are not closely monitored.
So while I feel it acutely today (I wondered why I didn't get my FreeBSD CD release and found out that Walnut Creek had my old card) I expect the experience to expand across the population as the number of dynamic subscriptions increase, the number of 'resets' due to exposed cards increases, and the time wastage of re-doing everything creates a value proposition.
Also, I have a few ideas I would like to explore. Email me at inlith@gmail.com and we can talk.